Found in translation

Take the very English Arts and Crafts movement of the last century, mix in some classic Japanese elements and you get the extraordinary 'Mingei' tradition. Tamsin Blanchard reports on the V&A's latest 'folk' find

I am kneeling at a low table, eating eel and rice out of a bento box in a house in Hamamatsu, roughly halfway between Tokyo and Kyoto. I am here with Karen Livingstone and Rupert Faulkner, curators of an exhibition that opens this week at the Victoria & Albert Museum. International Arts and Crafts is a major show examining the spread of the Arts and Crafts movement from the UK through Europe to the US and Japan. It's quite a journey.

You might wonder how the very English style of Morris and Ruskin manifested itself in the Far East. But their writings were translated into Japanese in the 1880s and had a profound effect on Yanagi Soetsu, who led Japan's most influential modern craft movement, from 1900 to 1945. The Mingei movement was a celebration of Japanese folk crafts - objects meant for everyday use, made by independent craftspeople, and until the 1900s perceived to be of no value financially or culturally. Yanagi Soetsu set about changing all of that by collecting Mingei (it translates as 'folk crafts') pieces made by unknown craftsmen. In 1936 he opened the Japan Folk Crafts Museum in Tokyo, dedicated to these most humble of objects - ceramics, textiles, wooden sculpture, basketwork and paintings. Yanagi - father of Yanagi Sori, the furniture designer responsible for the iconic Fifties Butterfly stool still in production by Vitra - masterminded a design for a summer pavilion at an exhibition promoting domestic products in Tokyo in 1928. It was the equivalent of the Ideal Home exhibition, and was a chance for Yanagi to create his vision of an aesthetic domestic life.

The pavilion was built in a farmhouse style, and the interior was a mix of East and West. There was a Western-style dining table with dark wood dining chairs and hand-woven cushions; there were shelves displaying Yanagi's prized folk-craft ceramics; there were decorative tiles around the medieval English fireplace that would have looked at home in Eric Gill's Arts and Crafts cottage in Ditchling, Sussex. It was a blueprint for a new way of living - twisting Japanese traditions and mixing nostalgia with a modern sensibility.

There was the English black-and-white half timbering that was as exotic to the Japanese as tatami mats were to the English. The house is the culmination of all of Yanagi's interests and uses the work of all of his friends, including the potters Hamada Shoji, who designed the tiles (and travelled to St Ives and Ditchling in the Twenties with English potter Bernard Leach) and Kawai Kanjiro, whose house in Kyoto is now open as a museum - it is a beautiful example of a Mingei interior. The rugs and cushions were woven by Aota Goro, who was part of the Kyoto-based craft guild, which lived as a commune.

The 1928 pavilion was bought in its totality by the industrial Yamamoto family and transported to the Mikuni district north of Osaka as a guest house for the main residence. It was known as the Mikuniso. For years, it was believed to have been destroyed in an air raid during the war. But in 1998, a Japanese architectural historian discovered that the Mikuniso was still intact. At the same time, the contents were acquired by the Oyamazaki Villa Museum in Kyoto, itself a strange Thirties recreation of a mock Tudor, English Arts and Crafts country house. In 2003, Rupert Faulkner and International Arts and Crafts curator Karen Livingstone travelled to Japan to bring the Mikuniso - unseen by the public for 75 years - to the V&A.

Which brings us back to our eel and rice lunch in Hamamatsu. This house was built as an extension to an existing manor house in the Twenties, by the same carpenters who built the Mikuniso. Faulkner is here to see their handiwork - a living, breathing Mingei house. The father of the house is sitting in a kimono, drinking tea with his friends, while the mother prepares our lunch behind the scenes. Their daughter talks us through the history of the house and then serves us whipped green tea out of antique 17th-century tea bowls.

Meanwhile, the dining room and master's room of the Mikuniso are being lovingly reconstructed, with Japanese precision, in a shipping warehouse in Osaka. The real thing was too fragile to be shipped to the UK, but the reconstruction, which arrived at the V&A in 10 cases, is almost identical. It took just two days to put back together, and it is a little like a stage set.

'The Mikuniso was presented as a model for middle-class living,' says Faulkner. Some of the furniture and artefacts are from the original house. The table and chairs are on loan from the Yamamoto family, who still own the Mikuniso. Until recently, they were still in daily use in the family home - just as they were intended to be when they were made almost 80 years ago.